- Joined
- Feb 24, 2006
- Messages
- 73
- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 6
- Your Mac's Specs
- G4 + Mac Pro 8-core 6Gb
I've suffered severe loss of performance for about 6 months or more, searching for a reason why so much time is lost on beachballs, unable to click on anything. All this happens immediately from boot, having to wait for 10 - 30 minutes for the menubar or dock to appear, with applications bobbing for ages, and then either refusing to start, sat static, or the little blue light will eventually come on, so it's usable, but just by right-or-left-clicking would freeze the dock, until it's ready to respond. Just typing anything, such as this text, I've had to wait unlimited minutes for the cursor to start again and let me continue.
The most annoying bit is having extreme pauses playing music in iTunes - from < 1 second to minutes of silence. All beachballs. A test with radio instead of playing stored MP3s gave me the answer.
Remember how many factors there can be in failing to respond. I thought it was corrupted software, or waiting for remote hosts on LAN or WAN. I thought two 2.8GHz Xeons, 100Gb of free disk space and 6GB of FB-DIMMS on my Mac Pro on the latest Snow would be sufficient. Theoretically the system was working, if you're content to wait for so long to get anything done. Nothing lost, apart from time, accompanied by fury.
Downloading SMART Utility is all I needed. With not much detail on the status; just FAILING was enough. The hang-ups made it all clear. Verifying the disk, and continually repairing permissions did no good. I wish a simple verify would include some more detail, rather than just OK. I think Apple would do themselves some good instead of letting their userbase suffer loss.
I fired up Time Machine to keep 24-hour policy switched on while looking for a new disk to buy. I tried restoring over the original disk with exactly the same attributes. Now, restoring the backup over a fresh disk has made a snappy, swift machine, without one single beachball in sight. Wondering what to do with the two-year-old bad disk, after a reformat. The next time I see a beachball, I know what I'll be doing
The most annoying bit is having extreme pauses playing music in iTunes - from < 1 second to minutes of silence. All beachballs. A test with radio instead of playing stored MP3s gave me the answer.
Remember how many factors there can be in failing to respond. I thought it was corrupted software, or waiting for remote hosts on LAN or WAN. I thought two 2.8GHz Xeons, 100Gb of free disk space and 6GB of FB-DIMMS on my Mac Pro on the latest Snow would be sufficient. Theoretically the system was working, if you're content to wait for so long to get anything done. Nothing lost, apart from time, accompanied by fury.
Downloading SMART Utility is all I needed. With not much detail on the status; just FAILING was enough. The hang-ups made it all clear. Verifying the disk, and continually repairing permissions did no good. I wish a simple verify would include some more detail, rather than just OK. I think Apple would do themselves some good instead of letting their userbase suffer loss.
I fired up Time Machine to keep 24-hour policy switched on while looking for a new disk to buy. I tried restoring over the original disk with exactly the same attributes. Now, restoring the backup over a fresh disk has made a snappy, swift machine, without one single beachball in sight. Wondering what to do with the two-year-old bad disk, after a reformat. The next time I see a beachball, I know what I'll be doing
We hear about this sort of problem all the time (beach-balls, apps taking forever to load, slow response to mouse clicks, etc.).
